Data Then & Now Research Seminar

Data Then & Now Research Seminar

INSC 578, Profs. Megan Finn, David Ribes, and Anissa Tanweer, Winter 2020 – See Syllabus

This seminar was a companion to the 2020 bi-weekly Data Then and Now talk series, which was co-hosted by the eScience Institute, the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering, and the Information School. Every other week we had the opportunity to hear from speakers who helped us interrogate the antecedents and continuities of our current data-intensive moment, by talking about histories of data and stories about data production and circulation. In preparation for those guest speakers’ talks, we would have previous sessions to discuss and interpret their work. Rather than tearing them down, the objectives of our preparatory discussions were to situate the field of work that would be presented and understand the speaker’s perspectives.

These discussions and talk series exposed me to broader discussions that reside at the intersection of data science and STS. Adding to the STS in Action course, this Seminar gave me even more historical background about the uses of data over time, and in scenarios different from the government. It allowed me to explore stories of data in a number of diverse contexts such as, for example, gas chromatography in the 1960s and ‘70s, HIV prevention strategies in the 2010s, or ubiquitous computing in the ‘90s. in this way, the extensive variety of scholarship and speakers to which I was exposed drove me to widen the concept of data and to challenge my personal assumptions about privacy.

Product

As part of our responsibilities for the seminar, we had to host a speaker in pairs. The duties associated with hosting a speaker included: i) Identifying two readings for discussion prior to the week that the speaker was coming; and ii) Preparing a five-minute overview to lead off the preparatory discussion about the speaker.

My pair and I hosted Jim Thatcher, an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Washington – Tacoma whose work examines the recursive relations between data, environment, and society. In his talk titled “Data, computation, and parasitic capitalism: towards a digital political ecology of the Columbia River,” Thatcher used Bitcoin as a case study to explore the highly uneven and intertwined infrastructural, ecological, political, and economic systems on which emerging digital infrastructures rest. As a preparation for his talk, we proposed the following two readings for discussion:

Thatcher, J. (2014). Big data, big questions| Living on fumes: Digital footprints, data fumes, and the limitations of spatial big data. International Journal of Communication, 8, 1765–1783.
McCarthy, J. and Thatcher, J. (2019). Visualizing new political ecologies: A critical data studies analysis of the World Bank’s renewable energy resource mapping initiative. Geoforum, 102, 242-254.

You can find here the slides we used to lead the preparatory discussion.

Selected Readings

Hong, S. (2020). “Data’s Intimacy” in Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society. New York: NYU Press.
Crawford, K. and Joler, V. (2018). Anatomy of an AI System. The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources. Available at: https://anatomyof.ai/
Steyerl, H. (2016). A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition. E-Flux Journal, 72. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apophenia-and-pattern-mis-recognition/